Wind farms take shape in Illinois fields

Friday

Jan 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 30, 2009 at 1:37 PM

Traveling along Interstate 155 not far from its junction with Interstate 55, wind turbines — nearly as tall as a football field is long — create a striking vertical presence on a decidedly horizontal landscape.

Chris Young

It’s 16 degrees outside, but workers still are pressure-washing the 125-foot-long blades that soon will be spinning high above a Logan County farm.

The spray looks particularly cold as it catches the sun on a clear and frigid morning.

“If you buy a new car, you’d want it clean,” says Bill Lotz as he washes off road salt and other grime accumulated when the blades were transported by truck to the Rail Splitter Wind Farm under construction northwest of Lincoln.

Lotz and co-worker Brian Bennett are among the more than 200 people building the 67-turbine facility that eventually will generate enough power for 30,000 homes.

Traveling along Interstate 155 not far from its junction with Interstate 55, the wind turbines — nearly as tall as a football field is long — create a striking vertical presence on a decidedly horizontal landscape.

It’s a scene that is becoming more common, especially since improvements in technology have made wind energy more practical and economical. Add in the fact that government standards will require 25 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2025, and Illinois appears to be in the midst of a wind energy boom.

Just stopping at the row of construction trailers a quarter mile off Illinois 136 where various contractors have set up shop, it’s clear that wind energy has moved past the curiosity stage to big business.

“This is the tip of the iceberg in central Illinois as far as the wind industry is concerned,” says Michael Parker of Horizon Wind Energy of Bloomington. Horizon is based in Houston.

Howard Lerner, president of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago, says Illinois is in position to be one of the top half-dozen states in the nation for wind energy — if the state develops sound policies and implements them properly. Simply getting a law on the books isn’t enough, he says.

“The legislature passes a bill and the governor signs it,” he says. “And then the fun begins.”

Illinois stands to benefit from the wind industry in a number of ways, he says.

“We are poised to capture the wind energy, capture the green industry construction and manufacturing jobs, capture economic development for rural areas and capture new sources of income for farmers,” Lerner says.

Central Illinois has more going for it than a windswept landscape.

“We have the existing infrastructure, like access to transmission lines,” Parker says. “And we have the wind — and not just gusty wind. We have a continuous wind.”

He says the wind industry doesn’t take things such as nearby transmission lines and existing roads for granted.

Much attention has been paid to the wind energy potential of the Great Plains states. But Parker says that out west, it can be a long way to the next road or transmission line. That adds to already steep upfront costs to get wind farms up and spinning.

“It’s a huge initial investment anyway,” Parker says.

Ironically, the very wind that attracts developers to a site can be a bit of a hindrance when building turbines.

“You get a great windy location, but you can lose a lot of construction days (when the wind is too great to lift large components and set them in place safely),” says Matt Cicero, assistant operations manager with Horizon. Cicero will be the company’s representative on-site once the wind farm is operational, possibly sometime in the spring.

Those components include three blades that are each 125 feet long and a nacelle — containing the gearbox and generator — that is the size of a camper trailer.

Currently Illinois gets less than 2 percent of its electricity from wind. But Lerner says he is optimistic that figure will be 3 percent by the end of 2009.

The nationwide goal is 25 percent by 2025, a figure Lerner, Parker and Cicero say can be achieved as long as the capital is available to build new wind farms and manufacturing capacity can keep pace with demand.

Many components are manufactured in the United States, including the tower sections that are built by Trinity Industries in Clinton.

Transportation costs are part of the expense of getting wind farms up and running, and Cicero says it “only makes sense to manufacture in America whenever possible.

“It’s a potential growth point for the economy,” he says.

Developing new wind farms always raises concerns among neighbors.

Some may not like the look of the turbines on the landscape. Others are concerned about possible noise and the effects on property values.

“There will always be some that don’t like them,” Lerner says.

Public meetings held last spring attracted about 150 people each to voice concerns about the building of Rail Splitter.

Cicero says each unit is highly automated and computer controlled. The computer senses the wind direction and turns the nacelle to face directly into the wind. The computer also adjusts the pitch of the blades for maximum efficiency.

He says Horizon tries to be responsive to landowners and neighbors, because complaints about noise usually mean one of the units is not operating properly and perhaps the computer has not reported the problem yet.

Computers also are designed to sense trouble and shut down the unit if necessary. Each group of towers is on its own circuit, so the whole wind farm won’t be shut down if one tower has a problem — similar to how a strand of Christmas lights will not go completely dark when one bulb burns out.

The blades, manufactured by General Electric, also have a thin strip of raised fins that are designed to limit noise. The idea is not that different from an owl’s wing, which has a fringe on the front edge designed to limit turbulence and allow the bird to fly silently.

Turbines also are placed so as not to interfere with one another.

“The development teams take into account a tremendous number of variables,” Cicero says, including distances from roads and houses and the topography around each turbine.

Turbines too close together can create turbulence that keeps them from operating properly.

“It’s much more than planting a turbine and turning it on,” says Cicero. “It’s huge. It’s a very impressive undertaking.”

Technology is fairly stable right now, he says.

“But there are still some frontiers to be crossed, such as storing the energy generated.”

New batteries are in development that would allow some electricity to be stored for use later.

“It’s still sort of new, I guess,” Cicero says of the wind power industry. “But it’s definitely established.”

Parker says meeting the goal of providing 25 percent of the nation’s renewable energy by 2025 will be difficult, but it can be done.

“It’s going to take a lot of work,” he says, “but I think it’s possible.”